John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

This post is part of the MACRA Monday series of blog posts where we dive into the details of the MACRA Quality Payment Program.

Next week we’ll be kicking off our weekly series of details from the MACRA Final Rule. However, before we start going through the changes and what you need to know about MACRA, I wanted to cover an important topic of concern for many practices. I’ve heard a lot of practices that are afraid of what they consider the uncertain future in the coming Trump presidency.

While I believe that healthcare could see significant impact from a Trump presidency, I don’t believe that MACRA will be impacted by the change in presidency. First, MACRA was as bipartisan as you could find in Washington DC. Even if Trump wanted to replace, modify, repeal MACRA, I can’t imagine it getting enough support in the senate and house. If this is true, Trump won’t even try to do anything with MACRA. Second, Trump has plenty of bigger fish to fry. When you look at the various priorities that Trump has said he has for his presidency, nothing indicates that MACRA will be anywhere near those priorities. Third, it’s hard for me to imagine that Trump would see a problem with the move to technology in healthcare.

What also is worth noting is that MACRA is separate from ACA (aka Obamacare) and even ARRA (the HITECH Act). I’ll leave the predictions for what will happen with ACA for other people. I have no doubt that ACA will be impacted by the change in presidency, but even if they did a full repeal of Obamacare (which looks like it’s impossible), MACRA will still remain and be in force. If MACRA was part of Obamacare, I’d have a different view, but since it’s not then I think MACRA will continue forward as planned.

Those of you hoping for MACRA to disappear due to the new president and those of you waiting for MACRA to change after the comment period is over are grasping at straws. Love it. Hate it. Feel however you may about MACRA, I really don’t see any scenario where MACRA is not part of the future of healthcare.

What do you think? If you disagree, I’d love to hear why in the comments. If you agree, I’d love to hear from you as well. With that view, we’ll be continuing MACRA Monday blog posts for the foreseeable future so that our readers are ready.

Be sure to check out all of our MACRA Monday blog posts where we dive into the details of the MACRA Quality Payment Program.

This guest blog post by John Squire, President and COO of Amazing Charts, is part of the MACRA Monday series of blog posts where we dive into the details of the MACRA Quality Payment Program.

With the long-awaited issuance of the MACRA Final Rule earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) tried to soften the blow for small practices in the first year of the program. Depending on the 2017 data you submit by March 31, 2018, your 2019 Medicare payments will be adjusted up, down, or not at all. This flexible timeline casts a wide net and should get everyone to participate.

Here’s a breakdown of all the options for 2017, from opt-out to maximum bonus, open to a small practice using a 2014 Certified EHR Technology (CEHRT). As you’ll see the sections get longer as we progress since each stage becomes more complex.

Be excluded from Medicare’s Quality Payment Program
In the Final Rule, CMS increased the exclusion threshold from $10,000 or less in Medicare Part B allowed charges, to $30,000 or less in billings, or seeing fewer than 100 Medicare Part B patients during the 2017 calendar year.

CMS estimates that this change will exempt approximately 30 percent of eligible clinicians from the Quality Payment Program. If you fall below the threshold, CMS will automatically exclude you. If you don’t meet the exclusion criteria, keep reading.

Do nothing… and take a penalty
Unlike previous programs such as Meaningful Use, there is no opt out for MACRA. If you don’t meet the exclusion requirement above, you are subject to downward adjustments. The Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) is the most likely option for small practices.

MIPS has a scale of 100 points. If you don’t report on any 2017 data by March 31, 2018, you’ll earn zero points and receive a four percent downward adjustment on your Medicare payments in 2019. This penalty rises over time, becoming five percent in 2020, seven percent in 2021, and nine percent in 2022!

A small minority of providers might be willing to make this financial sacrifice, but the vast majority of small practices using CEHRT are more likely to take a few simple steps to avoid the penalty.

Test out for a neutral outcome
You can avoid a downward adjustment by reporting just one quality measure, attesting to one improvement activity, or attesting to the four required Advancing Care Information (ACI) measures (formerly Meaningful Use) – for any length of time period in the calendar year of 2017. You’ll earn three points and there will be no downward adjustment to your 2019 payments.

This is a no-brainer for most small practices. If you use a 2014 Certified EHR, you’re already doing many of these activities, such as e-Prescribing, today. Belong to a Health Information Exchange? You’ve just earned your three points.

Participate for a bonus
You can earn four to 100 points for the chance of a small, moderate, or high positive adjustment to your payments in 2019. Submit at least 90 days of data on more than the minimum (i.e. on two or more quality measures, two or more improvement activities or more than the required four advancing care information measures) to earn more than three points.

Basically, the more information you submit over the longer length of time translates to more points and the more points you earn, the larger a positive adjustment on your payments will be, up to the maximum of four percent.

To earn the most possible points, (1) report for a full year on at least six quality measures (or a measure set); (2) attest to improvement activities worth 20 or 40 points (depending on the geography, size and make up of your practice); and (3) attest to all four of the required ACI measures as well as the five optional ACI measures, plus the one bonus ACI measure. Every 2014 Certified EHR technology has the functionality to support all ten ACI measures.

It could be easier than you think
CMS allows you to get a bonus for ACI when you use 2014 CEHRT to complete one of 94 eligible activities from the eight improvement activities categories. These include telehealth services, care coordination, or any kind of population health management. It could be something as simple as setting a flag for regular check-ups for your Medicare/Medicaid dual-eligible patients. A complete list can be found at this excellent CMS resource: https://qpp.cms.gov/measures/ia.

Even better news: providers participating in a patient-centered certified medical home (PCMH) will automatically receive full credit for the practice improvement category of MIPS. Similarly, providers participating in an Advanced Alternative Payment Model (APM) like an accountable care organization (ACO) will receive 50 percent of the full score for the practice improvement category.

Don’t get complacent – start today
While the agency’s idea of implementing a transition period was necessary, providers in small practices can’t get complacent. The formula for success is going to change very quickly. January 1, 2018 brings the full-year reporting requirement on the expanded measures. The quality measures will still be required and the cost measures (previously called “resource use”) are going to dial up. The year 2022 is only six years away, so unless the provider prepares next year, they could start facing some rather significant penalties.

About John Squire
John Squire, President and COO of Amazing Charts, has more than 27 years of high tech industry experience, 15 of them in Health IT. Before joining Amazing Charts, John was Senior Director of Alliances and Cloud Strategy for Microsoft’s U.S. Health and Life Sciences Business Unit.

Be sure to check out all of our MACRA Monday blog posts where we dive into the details of the MACRA Quality Payment Program.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

This is the first in an occasional series of stories I’m writing on how medical practices – particularly smaller groups – are handling their health IT challenges.If you have suggestions for future columns please feel free to write to me at anne@ziegerhealthcare.com.

It only took six months for Clem Surak to realize that his current EMR system wasn’t going to cut it. Surak, who bought Wilmington, NC-based primary care practice Health Partners in 2011 with his wife, didn’t originally come from the healthcare business, but he quickly saw that his IT platforms weren’t cost-effective.

The systems he inherited to run the practice, an Allscripts EHR sprawling across three servers and a companion practice management platform called Tiger, were “very proprietary” and tech support wasn’t easy to access. And they cost $20K per year to support two doctors.

Worse, the product wasn’t very current. “Meaningful Use had to be downloaded as a separate module,” said Surak.

Not surprisingly, Surak began looking for other options. After consulting with his local Regional Extension Center, he went with a new system from Amazing Charts (full disclosure: a former client of your editor). The new system, which went live in June 2012, offered some important benefits, including:

* Maintenance: Because the new solution is cloud-based, the practice doesn’t need to maintain the software or cope with technical breakdowns directly.

* Rollout: Implemented over the course of three months, with no slowdown or reduction in physician hours needed. “We kept our normal pace,” Surak says.

* Data transfer: To bring patient demographic data over from Allscripts to the new system, all the practice had to do was export Allscripts data into an Excel spreadsheet, then run an Amazing Charts wizard which imported it.

Of course, the practice faced some challenges as well, largely around adjusting workflow and phasing out the old system:

* Running in parallel: For the first few years after the transition to Amazing Charts, Health Partners had to keep the Allscripts system running alongside the new system.

* Practice management lag: Amazing Charts didn’t offer a practice management module at the time Health Partners acquired the EMR. Until mid-2015, when a practice management module became available, it had to keep doing patient scheduling and accounting in the Allscripts system.

Ultimately, despite some transitional hassles, Surak is glad he made the shift to a set of systems that work effectively in tandem. Putting a new EMR and practice management system in place hasn’t just saved money, it’s helped Surak keep efficiency high, running the practice with just a couple of support staffers.

“Most offices this size would have five to seven support staffers, but we don’t have to,” he says. “And keeping overhead down is the key to remaining independent.”

Andy Oram is an editor at O’Reilly Media, a highly respected book publisher and technology information provider. An employee of the company since 1992, Andy currently specializes in open source, software engineering, and health IT, but his editorial output has ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. His articles have appeared often on EMR & EHR and other blogs in the health IT space.

Andy also writes often for O’Reilly’s Radar site (http://oreilly.com/) and other publications on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM, and DebConf.

A couple months ago, Amazing Charts announced an upcoming API for their new electronic health record, InLight. Like athenahealth, whose API I recently covered, Amazing Charts is Software as a Service (SaaS), offering its new EHR on the Web.

The impetus toward an API wasn’t faddish for Amazing Charts; they had a clear vision of what they wanted to achieve by doing so. They found that their interactions with various health care providers–payers, labs, radiologists, and others, along with accepting medical device data–has been hampered by reliance on common standards that involve HL7 messaging and EDI. The HL7 standards are inconsistently implemented and EDI is non-standardized, so each interface requires weeks of work.

I talked to Prayag Patil, product manager of patient engagement solutions at Amazing Charts. (They also offer patient portals to the institutions they serve.) For all their data exchanges, he said, they expect a RESTful API to provide standardization, speed, and simplicity in implementation. It should also be more suited to quick, fine-grained data transfers.

One of the common complaints of the older HL7 standards such as the CCD-A is that they are monolithic. EHR vendors and healthcare providers shove a lot into them without deciding what the recipient really needs. As Patil says, “it makes the 80% use case hard to do.” Nor is the standard used consistently by all correspondents (labs, practice management systems, devices, etc.), so extracting what’s really important at the receiving end is harder.

They’ve found that sluggish exchange has real effects on patient safety. For instance, a set of lab results, medications, and other information from a hospital discharge should be available immediately. If you wait, the patient their primary care provider won’t have it just after discharged, when its value is often critical, and the patient might lose interest and not bother to look at it later.

Amazing Charts, like athenahealth, also recognizes the value of a third-party marketplace. Patil says that innovation tends to “come from the smaller, scrappier vendors” that are enabled to produce useful apps by open APIs. The company already has a third party marketplace for apps in care coordination, revenue cycle management, patient engagement, and other tasks. But up to now the APIs weren’t published, so their developers had to work individually with any vendor who came to them, offering tools and the help needed to integrate with Amazing Charts’ service.

The company plans to introduce a patient engagement platform that will be open and accessible, with a focus on using standardized RESTful APIs to enable third party app developers to offer solutions. The company also plans to increase participation by creating thorough documentation for the APIs, and standardizing them. They are looking forward to standards such as FHIR, SMART-on-FHIR, and OpenID/OAuth, which are better specified and more consistently implemented than the currently available interfaces.

Here are the lessons I draw for others who are looking enviously at projects with APIs: going forward without all the pieces in place will be like driving on one flat tire. You just won’t get the results that you hoped for when investing in the project.

I applaud Amazing Charts for taking the difficult first steps toward API access, and doing it with good goals in mind. Their experience shows that an open API is still a hard process to get going–even as more and more companies take the leap–and one that calls for coordinated efforts throughout the organization in software design, publicity, documentation, and support.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

It seems appropriate this July 4th to take a look a the medical record of George Washington. The great part is that Amazing Charts has chose to do just that. You can see George Washington’s medical record at 57 in Amazing Charts here or click the image below.

It’s pretty fun to look back in time and think about what would have been included in George Washington’s medical record. Amazing Charts also points out that he had a lot of diseases that have since been eradicated.

Here’s the press release Amazing Charts put out about the George Washington’s medical record:

Electronic Health Record of First U.S. President Sheds New Light on Progress of Healthcare

Fictional Electronic Health Record for President George Washington Is Based on Historical Accounts of Infections, Injuries, and Other Serious Medical Ailments

BOSTON, MA–(Marketwired – June 30, 2015) – How healthy was the Father of Our Country? That was the question asked by Amazing Charts when it constructed a fictional Electronic Health Record (EHR) for President George Washington at the age of 57, ten years before his death, based on historical accounts from physicians, family members, and other eyewitnesses.

President Washington experienced a wide variety of diseases, including tuberculosis, malaria, and smallpox. With the perspective of today’s medical knowledge, this clinical documentation sheds new light on the progress of healthcare over the past 200 years. The record was created using Amazing Charts EHR software and includes President Washington’s demographics, review of past medical history, medications list, and present complaint.

According to Marc L. Mosier, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Pri-Med/Amazing Charts, a leading provider of medical education and electronic health record (EHR) systems: “This historically reconstructed medical record highlights some noteworthy facts about President Washington. He was afflicted by a long list of health concerns, most of which have been nearly eradicated by the progress of medicine. His health record also dramatically illustrates the amazing evolution of medicine over the past two centuries and our ability to better manage disease and illness today.”

Amazing Charts provides Electronic Health Records (EHR/EMR), Practice Management, and other Health IT solutions to healthcare practices. Based on number one user ratings for usability, fair pricing, and overall satisfaction, Amazing Charts EHR has been adopted by more than 10,000 clinicians in over 6,800 private practices. Founded in 2001 by a family physician, today Amazing Charts, LLC operates as a subsidiary of Pri‐Med, an operating division of Diversified Communications (DC) and a trusted source for professional medical education to over 260,000 clinicians since 1995. For more information, visit: www.amazingcharts.com.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

This article last month in Crain’s New York Business talks about the pressures that primary care doctors are facing and how those financial pressures are getting many of them to try cash-only or concierge practices. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

To stave off the pressures prompting many physicians to sell their practices to hospital systems, Manhattan internist Peter Bruno has tried a number of creative solutions. They have ranged from forming a now-disbanded group practice with 60 colleagues to his ongoing strategy of working at a nursing home one day a week to supplement his income in his current solo practice.
…
With reimbursements dropping, Dr. Bruno made the bold move in July of converting his six-employee private practice on East 59th Street in Manhattan to a hybrid concierge model. In concierge care, patients pay an annual fee or retainer to get more immediate, customized care. Hybrid practices treat both concierge and traditional patients. He worked with SignatureMD, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based network that assists physicians in doing so.

I don’t think we need to cover the financial realities of being a solo physician here. You’re all to aware of the challenges. However, I’m interested to hear what you think about the potential for the concierge model of medicine for primary care doctors? Is that an option for most primary care doctors?

I ask this because I’ve seen concierge medicine work in the rich areas (the above case is Manhattan for example), but I have yet to see it really work in poorer areas. If we’re shifting to concierge medicine, what does that mean for the poorer areas of the country?

Here in Las Vegas, they have an interesting hybrid model that they’re trying where concierge medicine is part of the insurance plan. In fact, it could be part of the insurance plan your employer provides. I just signed up for the plan, so we’ll see how it goes.

Just today SRSsoft announced their new SRS Essentials product that’s a non-MU EHR as well. Although, they offer an interesting wrinkle that allows their SRS Essentials customers to move up to an meaningful use certified EHR should they decide they later want to take part in meaningful use (or whatever that program eventually becomes).

Of course, SRSsoft focuses mostly on the specialty market and not general medicine. Although, maybe this physician focused EHR product will be of interest to the emerging concierge and direct primary care doctors as well.

What do you think of these new models of medicine? What’s their place in the healthcare world? Where are they going in the future? Will their technology needs be different than other doctors?

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I had the chance to sit down and interview John Squire, President and COO of Amazing Charts. I was interested to learn about the transition Amazing Charts has experienced after being purchased by Pri-Med and the departure of Amazing Charts Founder, Jonathan Bertman. Plus, I wanted to learn why Amazing Charts wasn’t yet 2014 Certified and their plans to make it a reality. We also talk about the value of meaningful use and the ICD-10 delay. Then, we wrap up with a look at where Amazing Charts is headed in the future.

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Here at EMRandEHR.com, as well as in blogs across the web, we’ve been predicting that this will be the time when the EMR vendor market will begin to consolidate. I stand by that prediction. But I have to admit that the first couple of deals I’ve tracked have turned out differently than I had expected.

Consider the acquisition of Amazing Charts by Pri-Med, a provider of professional medical education to more than 260,000 clinicians. I would have assumed that Amazing Charts would be acquired by a larger EMR vendor to fill out its offering physicians, but instead, Amazing sold to a publishing company with a huge physician base. In retrospect, it makes plenty of sense, but for some reason I didn’t see it coming.

EMR vendor athenahealth pursued a similar strategy recently when it signed a definitive agreement to buy Epocrates, perhaps the most popular mobile application used by physicians today. athenahealth agreed to pay almost $300 million in cash for Epocrates, 22 percent more than what the mobile app vendor’s’ stock was worth on the day in question, in a move that the EMR company concedes tapped out its credit line.

But costly though the deal might have been, athena is getting a lot for its money. Buying Epocrates adds another one million physicians to its comparatively small provider base of 38,000. If you consider the app itself plus the physician users, athenahealth’s investment seems pretty reasonable. When you consider how costly it is to acquire physicians as customers, a deal valuing them at $300 a physician doesn’t sound astronomical to me.

What I’m getting at, bottom line, is that other EMR players are likely to follow the model established by the Amazing Charts and athenahealth deals. I think this approach — buying, rather than begging for, new physician relationships — makes a great deal of sense. What about you?

Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare consultant and analyst with 20 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. Contact her at @ziegerhealth on Twitter or visit her site at Zieger Healthcare.

Some of you are going to tell me that I’ve jumped the gun, but I’ve got my feeling about this and I’m sticking to it. Though nothing massive has happened yet, I believe we’re officially beginning to see consolidation in the EMR world.

I was struck with this idea today when I came upon the news that physician EMR company Imagine MD was closing. According to MedCityNews.com, the cloud-based EMR company had pulled in $25 million in venture money, $10 million of that in the last 12 months. And until recently, it looked as though it had staying power; Imagine MD had been in business since 2006, well ahead of the pack of competitors pitching small medical practices.

Another sign that we’re seeing consolidation comes in the form of the acquisition of Amazing Charts by Pri-Med, a provider of professional medical education to more than 260,000 clinicians. (I wouldn’t have expected a medical education company to be the one to acquire Amazing, but that’s a story for another time.)

While I admit two examples isn’t exactly a statistical bump, it’s a clear enough sign for me that the market has begun to pull together. After all, with EMR adoption on the rise among medical practices, there’s only so many customers left to compete for, and that can only mean more closings and M&A.

The really important question, if you’re a doctor hoping to avoid a big practice disruption, is whether you can predict which direction your present or future EMR vendor is going. That is, of course, a pretty tricky game.

But if you’d like some food for thought, you might consider checking out a previous post by John, comparing “fast EMR companies” fueled by venture capital to slower-moving types that grow organically and don’t tend to accept venture capital investments.

While there are exceptions — notably Practice Fusion, which seems to have an extremely solid business — the tech business is rife with examples of fast companies that soared high on venture capital drafts then plummeted to earth. I’m not suggesting that you should avoid VC-backed EMR firms, physicians, but I am suggesting that you find out as much as you can about the size of their customer base, finances and strategy before you commit your business into their hands.

Otherwise, you could end up like ImagineMD’s EMR-less customers. And if that’s not a bummer I don’t know what is.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

I was recently reading this fascinating interview with Jason Fried, Founder of 37signals. It’s a fascinating read, as was his book Rework. I must admit that I have a similar model for tech entrepreneurship to Jason Fried and it is quite different than what’s written about by most tech websites. Jason is much less about the flash and cash part of entrepreneurship and much more about building something of value in a long term sustainable way.

As I consider on these ideas, I started to wonder about the various EHR companies and which companies fall into the various entrepreneurship buckets.

Fast EMR
The fast EMR company is usually one that’s gone out and gotten a ton of funding from venture capital firms. If you’re an EHR company that’s gone out and raised millions and millions in funding, then you have no choice but to attack the market aggressively so that you can provide a return to your investors. There are actually a number of EHR companies that fit this profile, but the first one that will likely come into everyone’s mind is Practice Fusion. There $64 million in EHR funding means that they have to get a large portion of the EHR market. They no longer have the option of staying small but successful.

Let me be clear that there’s nothing wrong with being a Fast EMR. In fact, there are a lot of good things that come out of fast EMR companies that are trying to push the envelope when it comes to EHR adoption and how EHR should be done. It is entrepreneurship at work.

Slow and Steady EMR
On the opposite end of the spectrum are what I call the slow and steady EMR companies. These companies are often self funded or took in a much smaller investment and then used revenues to grow the company much like 37signals founder described. They slowly and steadily built their product, acquired customers and generated revenue.

I believe that SOAPware and Amazing Charts are the epitome of this type of company. They were both physician founded EMR companies that have built their user base slowly over time. They’ve never gone out and gotten the millions in funding. Instead they’ve grown organically over time.

Why Does This Matter?
In my e-Book on EHR selection, I talk about why it is important for you to understand the type of EHR company you are choosing. Would you rather “marry” the EMR tortoise or the EMR hare? The choice could change your EHR experience dramatically.

Disclosure: Practice Fusion, Amazing Charts and SOAPware are all advertisers on this site, but I didn’t discuss this post with them before posting it. Although, since they’re advertisers they were likely top of mind for me when I was writing this post.